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The development and validation of an actuarial risk assessment tool for the prediction of first-time offending

Journal

International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology

Volume | Issue number

60 | 7

Pages (from-to)

847-864

Number of pages

18

Document type

Article

Faculty

Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG)

Institute

Research Institute of Child Development and Education (RICDE)

Abstract

For prevention purposes, it is important that police officers can estimate the risk for delinquency among juveniles who were
involved in a criminal offense, but not in the role of a suspect. In the present study, the Youth Actuarial Risk Assessment
Tool for First-Time Offending (Y-ARAT-FO) was developed based solely on police records with the aim to enable Dutch police
officers to predict the risk for first-time offending. For the construction of this initial screening instrument, an Exhaustive
Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (Exhaustive CHAID) analysis was performed on a data set that was retrieved from
the Dutch police system. The Y-ARAT-FO was developed on a sample of 1,368 juveniles and validated on a different sample of
886 juveniles showing moderate predictive accuracy in the validation sample (area under the receiver operating characteristic
curve [AUC] = .728). The predictive accuracy of the Y-ARAT-FO was considered sufficient to justify its use as an initial screening
instrument by the Dutch police.

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